Quantum Leap

ARTICLES ABOUT QUANTUM LEAP BY DATE - PAGE 2

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has filed a negligence suit against renowned architect Frank Gehry, charging that flaws in his design of the $300 million Stata Center in Cambridge caused leaks to spring, masonry to crack, mold to grow and drainage to back up. The suit says that MIT paid Los Angeles-based Gehry Partners $15 million to design the Stata Center, which was hailed by critics as innovative and eye-catching with its unconventional walls...

Einstein: His Life and Universe By Walter Isaacson Simon & Schuster, 680 pages, $32 Einstein By Jurgen Neffe, translated from German by Shelley Frisch Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 461 pages, $30 One day in May 1905, Albert Einstein announced to his friend and sounding board, Michele Besso: "Thank you. I've completely solved my problem." Years of deep thought on fundamental tensions in physics culminated in his eureka moment in developing the special theory of relativity.

Not long after Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks basketball team, the dotcom billionaire became famous for running on the court during games and running his mouth as he pleased. Within months, he was one of the most controversial and most fined owners in National Basketball Association history. He also helped develop one of the best teams in the country. Young talent and solid coaching get most of the credit for the squad's success, but Cuban also instituted unconventional techniques, such as hiring his former college math professor to formulate equations to help coaches pick a lineup.

In the bizarre realm of quantum mechanics--the physics theory that stumped even Albert Einstein--tiny things like electrons and packets of light often seem to be in two places at once, in total violation of common sense. Now a University of Illinois physics team has taken that principle and built something harder to fathom: a quantum-based computer that can be awake and asleep at the same time, and spit out answers even if its program is never triggered. It's plenty strange, but some experts say such real-world spinoffs of eerie quantum effects are growing so common that it's our understanding of "strange" that needs to change.

The interviews are being given, the stories are being written and the word is being spread and swallowed, as it is each and every summer, that the Bears are stronger at such-and-such position and deeper at another position and generally a whole lot better off than they were the year before. Well, it was time for a first look at these 2005 Bears in actual action Monday night, if you count exhibition play as actual action. (And I do.) It was nice of ABC to let the Bears make a rare appearance on "Monday Night Football," even in a preseason Hall of Fame Game, given that the Bears have a really lousy record of 16-32 on Monday nights and haven't won a genuine game on a Monday since 1997.

From the day Orpheus invented music, composers have delighted in blazing new paths to new worlds made up of new sounds nobody has ever heard before. The adventuresome American composers Steven Mackey and Joshua Fineberg, whose works anchored the season finale of the Chicago Symphony's MusicNOW contemporary series Tuesday at the Harris Theater for Music and Dance, have taken the process a step further. Both use traditional instruments to create the effect of instruments that exist, partly or exclusively, in their own imaginations.

- I have always enjoyed the series "Quantum Leap" with Scott Bakula. I tried never to miss an episode, but I fear I may have missed a couple. Can you tell me if it ever will come out on DVD? --Becke Parks, Wichita, Kan. Actually, it already is ... much of it, anyway. The third season, which also starred Dean Stockwell, was released on disc three weeks ago. The preceding two seasons have been available for a while, and the remaining episodes are likely in the plans of Universal Studios Home Video as well, although no release dates for those have been specified yet. - What happened to the show "The 4400"?

`Millennium Park was first conceived in 1997," proclaims a City of Chicago Web site, "with the original mission of creating new parkland in Grant Park to transform the unsightly railroad tracks and parking lots that had long dotted the lakefront in prime real estate in downtown Chicago."

Esteban Loaiza knows it wasn't a dream, but sometimes he still can't believe it. "I still get flashbacks about the season and I kind of pinch myself," he said. "I want to keep having that same kind of success." After winning no more than 11 games in any of his first eight major-league seasons, Loaiza exploded with 21 victories last year. The secret that turned his career around was a cut fastball. Too bad he didn't learn the pitch earlier in his career. "Five or six years ago was a different story," Loaiza said.